Sith and jedi are schools of force training, like styles of martial arts. If you're a jedi who uses the dark side of the force, that doesn't mean you've been trained and taught as a Sith, just like holding a black belt in karate and knowing a few aikido throws doesn't mean you're actually qualified on the subject of aikido.
Thats me. The normal people just don't understand how it can be a mind-numbing effort of will to show up someplace regularly in "regular hours".
If you don't have problems sleeping you don't understand how much it can slowly erode away one's life.
I'm overweight (now), but my problems sleeping started when I was kid in kindergarden and I was no more than slightly pudgy then...and as I've gotten older my problems have both worsened and lessened.
I am much better at being able to *go* to sleep, instead of it being a nightly problem, and then a once a week every two weeks, and now doing to once or twice a month. Its so nice not to have to lie in bed for hours or reading or whatever, desperately tired, yet unable to sleep - note however that tonight I've been unable to sleep.
But, after years of being unemployed / college student with very flexible daylight demands, my circadian rhythm is non-existant, or at least badly broken. My "natural" sleeping preference is for daylight - come dawn and I yawn. Nice bright sunny noon and I want to be inside in bed. Doing anything else leaves me feeling as disoriented and uncomfortable feeling as the people I've known doing nightshifts have said doing such shiftwork made them feel.
I went into work every day, when I was fortunate enough to be working for six months before I got laid off, damn startup, feeling like I'd been dragged out of bed in the middle of the night, even if I'd just woken up from a good nights sleep.
Perhaps he was simply indicating he was using the human-friendly notation, as opposed to the advanced Vulcan system, which though far less emotional than illogical human measurements, required a lifetime of discipline to use.
It's not hard to make a dog grow an orange. A little training to dig a hole, playing with an orange seed-laden "bone", dragging over a water hose for a treat...
Controlled conditions in a greenhouse, so the dog doesn't need to worry about frost or pests...it could be done.
It'd take a while, and both you and the dog have better things to do...
I was struggling in kindergarten to cut paper, with the scissors in my right hand. The teacher came by, looked at me for a bit, and said "You're left handed!"
She took the scissors, gave me a left-handed pair, and off I went like a shot. I swapped hands for everything in class - writting, cutting, etc. All those manual dexterity tasks became much easier.
I don't remember anyone before this saying anything about my handedness - definately no abuse or restrictions on left-hand use.
So, I'm left-handed. Only thing I do right-handed is mouse, and that's because I didn't run into a left-handed mouse to use until something like 5 years after using right-handed mice and by then it was generally too late to change. If I ever find a decent left-handed trackball the mirror image of my Logitech one, I might take a crack at switching though.
I always pictured something like the mouth of a volcano, with Obi Wan leaving him for dead, only to have Anakin tractored out by an agent of the Empire to be remade into Darth.
But hey, I'm sure with the New Lucas he'll trip over Jar Jar (who is being cute and funny) and fall to his death while in the middle of arguing over exactly *how* stoned his mentor was when they went over the whole midichlorian thing.
You raise a lot of really good points. It's all about tradeoffs again, but at least you know what you're talking about, and it's always good to discuss these things with someone who gets it, even if they don't like it. Too many people seem to argue against it without understanding.
I've been making a conscious effort to be fair in this. With the close releases of both KDE and GNOME urging me to give them a try (what with the ease of installation/rollback in gentoo) I wanted to be able to make a fair comparison, and not be speaking on a purely theoretical basis.
About a month ago I did the same week long test for KDE as I did for GNOME. I wasn't really very happy with KDE either. I like the eye-candy of KDE but it just isn't snappy enough nor was it completely stable - as in my previous experiences with KDE fifteen or twenty minutes fiddling with panels and applets would usually break *something* - unopenable minimized panels, crashing applets, vanishing panels, etc. The only bit of GNOME I actually managed to break was a mount applet that wouldn't go away, and that was only the once at the end of the trial.
KDE has gone in the opposite direction of GNOME as far as customization goes, IMO. Some of their defaults could be better, and though the option layout is improving it isn't what I would call elegant yet.
The window manager I maintain for Debian is pwm, which is actually ion's predecessor (same author), so you could say I'm somewhat familiar with ion. I've tried to use ion, but just couldn't get it in to a shape where I could use it effectively. ion2 now has a pwm theme, so the old pwm is out of date, but the original pwm is still the lightest window manager you'll find, with maybe the one possible exception of twm. It's pretty basic, but has a few nice keybindings, the ability to bind others, a windowmaker dock, a couple of decent color schemes, and the same tabs that were later used in ion. Those happened to be just the features I want out of a bare-bones wm, no more no less, so it's a good fit for me.
For a while I used to swap out of Ion into pwm whenever I needed to use an application that did not like being stuck in an ion frame (the old kdevelop in particular went bananas). I liked pwm, the little I used it. It's still installed, hehehe. For some reason I switched from using pwm as my alternate to using Window Maker, and then I switched to using it fulltime when I couldnt stand the compatability problems with Ion, no matter how much I loved the frames.
Well, if you want to keep your on-top window on top, that's your preference. No system is perfect, and that's just nitpicking. Of course, you could position every single window so that it never pops up over your gaim or tvtime window ever again, so this ceases to be a real problem. Your gaim and tvtime windows are also always in the same place, because you put them there. I mean, you wouldn't put your TV in the closet when you want to watch it, so why would you put it in a place where you've got windows popping up all the time? It's the same idea, and you have complete control over it.
Spatial metaphores assume there is one true location that I am going to want for a specific directory. Given that I work with a large number of applications, concurrently, each of which requires a differing amount of screen space, it is not a safe assumption that the last place I left a window is a reasonable location now. As far as on top applications go, sometimes I use it, and sometimes I don't - generally if it is actually important that I talk / watch as opposed to just having the service available then I'll go the extra step and flag something for on top layering.
Now let's say that I did use a fixed window layout, no matter how unlike my normal work habits that is, and I had worked out fixed locations of preference for the some hundred or so folder windows I would be drilling through in a day. If the set of applications I was working with changed significantly, so that I noticed I needed a new set of fixed folder window locations for those hundred or so folders windows commonly used, is there a way to accomplish that without manually moving them all?
Make that changing window locations to once or twice a day, heck even thrice, and you'll see where I'm coming from.
Don't get me wrong, I like being able to control window locations - I used to use Ion. If you don't know, Ion is a window manager that lets you define boxes on the screen which contain windows in tabs, much like Mozilla would web pages. No other window manager gives you so much control of your real estate. I'd still be using Ion if it wasn't for the constant problems with applications (sometimes from version to version) deciding they couldn't handle working in that sort of enviroment without freaking out.
Speaking of spatial stuff, one thing I'd like to see GNOME have, well Metacity really, is edge resistance when moving windows around. It certainly reinforces the illusion that windows are objects moving stuff around the screen when , for example, gaim doesn't want to move over another window without a little gentle persuasion.
I'd like to see GNOME go places and do interesting things. I just don't want to see them fail to respect their existing userbase and those advanced users who might be attracted to their platform but not willing to change every work habit they have to use it while in the process proclaiming anyone who doesn't follow their One True Way as a fool.
When you add a new file to this directory, it'll shift all the other files that are organized after it alphabetically. This may be what you want, but it's not always ideal. If the real world worked this way, you'd be pretty freaked out. Imagine putting a book on the shelf and then the next time you turn around half the books on the shelf have moved! It's jarring. The same thing applies to files on computers. For large sets of files, like image directories, alphabetical organization is great (nautilus shouldn't remove the ability to sort alphabetically) but it's not always what you want. Spatial organization doesn't remove the organization scheme you speak of, it only adds another organizational level that works very well in practice.
In whose practice? By all means point me at current studies for real people showing that opening and closing a seperate window at a random-but-expected place on the screen is faster than opening one tree-based file
> First off, you've re-proven my point about having > to navigate two whole file trees, instead of one > and a part. This is inefficient.
No, you don't have to navigate two file trees. You start in the second browser in the file tree at exactly the same place that you were in the browser you invoked it from. Not that navigating two file trees is really a burden - they are always the same...
As for chasing windows, yes I can take a guess at where they are going to show up, but that does NOT mean that the last place I left a window is close to where I am invoking it from, or isn't going to be covered up by my on-top GAIM or Tvtime window. I may know that a window is going to show up on the left edge of my screen, but that doesn't mean I enjoy traversing 1600 pixels to get there. That is lost time and effort, distracting me from my current task, which is moving files from A to B, not "scan across my desktop to my new working locus."
> You do have a point about the file attributes, > but with any sufficiently fast machine this > should not be an issue, because the machine is > usually just waiting on the human. Remember, > this stuff worked just great circa 1984.
On machines with a great deal less to do in the background. I've frequently got compiles running, instant messengers, IRC, email, a few firefox instances with 30 tabs each, an OpenOffice invokation, and all the servers my system is running behind it all such as sshd.
Just because my machine has plenty of horsepower and resources doesn't mean I'm not using it at the moment for something other than seeing files in a directory I'm just passing through.
As for files being where I left them, since I use "text" style file manager views, and tree browsers my files are ALWAYS where I left them - in alphabetical order in the same directory they were last time, unless I moved them. It is simplicity itself to jump down via my scrollwheel to the spot in the list where the files I want live.
> I'm sorry, but practical experience disproves > this. If you were correct, we'd have a lot of > Windows users out there who understood how file > systems worked a lot better.
Most windows users are computer illiterate, yes. But some of those users do become computer literate, some even learn to become programmers and migrate to linux.
The point I was trying to make is that no matter how many amazing things your GUI does for the computer illiterate if it is going to reduce the number of people who become literate, it is a bad thing. Well, unless you're a support contracter who gets paid by the hour.
Windows has many problems - it is both difficult for the new user, as well as not discoverable beyond the most superficial level by the advanced user. It is getting better but its a long way away.
Anyhow, my big beef with GNOME 2.6 is the attitude that it is their way or the highway, that any other viewpoint is not even worth considering.
Before GNOME 2.6 I ran into alot of GNOME evangelism saying that Spatial Nautilis was amazing and productive, and the sacred GNOME HIG was going lead to the the ultimate UI. Use GNOME, it said, and all will be well. There will be no angst, and productivity will abound.
If statements like that are going to be made, then I have to hold those who speak up to the standard they profess to hold. Where is this ease of use? Where is this simple and fulfilling metaphor? Why is it that I, the advanced user, must get shorted in your drive to make things newbie friendly?
Often it is an advanced user who directly or indirectly chooses the initial computer experience of a newbie. As long as I feel the GNOME developers are hostile to myself and my needs I feel no need to introduce anyone to their work.
You have to know in advance that the GNOME developers differentiate between the file managing and "browsing" ones files. That distinction is non-obvious for the general public - only someone who is up to speed on this particular GUI development decision is going to be familiar with that meaning for the verb "browse".
I recently used GNOME 2.6 for a week to try out the Spatial Nautilus I had heard so much about (and oh were promises of milk and honey made!). It wasn't until the last two days of that trial before I found a post that clarified the GNOME-centric connotation of the word "browse".
Most of the world uses the terms file manager and file browser interchangably. The browse as a codeword for classic/Windows/OS X style file managing information is a bit non-obvious lingo.
Slashdot Mirror
Smoke and mirrors! Smoke and mirrors!
Sith and jedi are schools of force training, like styles of martial arts. If you're a jedi who uses the dark side of the force, that doesn't mean you've been trained and taught as a Sith, just like holding a black belt in karate and knowing a few aikido throws doesn't mean you're actually qualified on the subject of aikido.
Jar Jar!
It's all in the fluffy bunny tail.
No bunny tail, no bunny hop, sorry.
Thats me. The normal people just don't understand how it can be a mind-numbing effort of will to show up someplace regularly in "regular hours".
If you don't have problems sleeping you don't understand how much it can slowly erode away one's life.
I'm overweight (now), but my problems sleeping started when I was kid in kindergarden and I was no more than slightly pudgy then...and as I've gotten older my problems have both worsened and lessened.
I am much better at being able to *go* to sleep, instead of it being a nightly problem, and then a once a week every two weeks, and now doing to once or twice a month. Its so nice not to have to lie in bed for hours or reading or whatever, desperately tired, yet unable to sleep - note however that tonight I've been unable to sleep.
But, after years of being unemployed / college student with very flexible daylight demands, my circadian rhythm is non-existant, or at least badly broken. My "natural" sleeping preference is for daylight - come dawn and I yawn. Nice bright sunny noon and I want to be inside in bed. Doing anything else leaves me feeling as disoriented and uncomfortable feeling as the people I've known doing nightshifts have said doing such shiftwork made them feel.
I went into work every day, when I was fortunate enough to be working for six months before I got laid off, damn startup, feeling like I'd been dragged out of bed in the middle of the night, even if I'd just woken up from a good nights sleep.
Perhaps he was simply indicating he was using the human-friendly notation, as opposed to the advanced Vulcan system, which though far less emotional than illogical human measurements, required a lifetime of discipline to use.
Guns and knives don't kill people.
People kill people.
Ban People!
Then we can all live in peace!
There's always posting to /. as the warfare of the future. No messy deaths, and your leader doesn't have to go live in the sand...
So THAT explains the last four years of my life.
It's not hard to make a dog grow an orange. A little training to dig a hole, playing with an orange seed-laden "bone", dragging over a water hose for a treat...
Controlled conditions in a greenhouse, so the dog doesn't need to worry about frost or pests...it could be done.
It'd take a while, and both you and the dog have better things to do...
My keyboard has the goddamn "sleep", "wake up", and "power" buttons. I hated them in windows - way too easy to hit them in the dark.
:)
Eventually disabled them, and of course in linux it's not a problem
Amen brother. Or sister. Or whatever.
I was struggling in kindergarten to cut paper, with the scissors in my right hand. The teacher came by, looked at me for a bit, and said "You're left handed!"
She took the scissors, gave me a left-handed pair, and off I went like a shot. I swapped hands for everything in class - writting, cutting, etc. All those manual dexterity tasks became much easier.
I don't remember anyone before this saying anything about my handedness - definately no abuse or restrictions on left-hand use.
So, I'm left-handed. Only thing I do right-handed is mouse, and that's because I didn't run into a left-handed mouse to use until something like 5 years after using right-handed mice and by then it was generally too late to change. If I ever find a decent left-handed trackball the mirror image of my Logitech one, I might take a crack at switching though.
I always pictured something like the mouth of a volcano, with Obi Wan leaving him for dead, only to have Anakin tractored out by an agent of the Empire to be remade into Darth.
But hey, I'm sure with the New Lucas he'll trip over Jar Jar (who is being cute and funny) and fall to his death while in the middle of arguing over exactly *how* stoned his mentor was when they went over the whole midichlorian thing.
Perhaps he needed to get to the little elves room?
The sad thing is that all makes more sense than episodes 1 and 2 put togather.
Episode 3.5
Afterbirth of the Empire?
ew.
Think loopback! :)
Oh boy. 4 inch movie screen!
Rock my world!
Orbital bombardment. It's the only way to be sure.
I've been making a conscious effort to be fair in this. With the close releases of both KDE and GNOME urging me to give them a try (what with the ease of installation/rollback in gentoo) I wanted to be able to make a fair comparison, and not be speaking on a purely theoretical basis.
About a month ago I did the same week long test for KDE as I did for GNOME. I wasn't really very happy with KDE either. I like the eye-candy of KDE but it just isn't snappy enough nor was it completely stable - as in my previous experiences with KDE fifteen or twenty minutes fiddling with panels and applets would usually break *something* - unopenable minimized panels, crashing applets, vanishing panels, etc. The only bit of GNOME I actually managed to break was a mount applet that wouldn't go away, and that was only the once at the end of the trial.
KDE has gone in the opposite direction of GNOME as far as customization goes, IMO. Some of their defaults could be better, and though the option layout is improving it isn't what I would call elegant yet.
For a while I used to swap out of Ion into pwm whenever I needed to use an application that did not like being stuck in an ion frame (the old kdevelop in particular went bananas). I liked pwm, the little I used it. It's still installed, hehehe. For some reason I switched from using pwm as my alternate to using Window Maker, and then I switched to using it fulltime when I couldnt stand the compatability problems with Ion, no matter how much I loved the frames.
Your sig made me spray Dr. Pepper all over my keyboard. :)
Spatial metaphores assume there is one true location that I am going to want for a specific directory. Given that I work with a large number of applications, concurrently, each of which requires a differing amount of screen space, it is not a safe assumption that the last place I left a window is a reasonable location now. As far as on top applications go, sometimes I use it, and sometimes I don't - generally if it is actually important that I talk / watch as opposed to just having the service available then I'll go the extra step and flag something for on top layering.
Now let's say that I did use a fixed window layout, no matter how unlike my normal work habits that is, and I had worked out fixed locations of preference for the some hundred or so folder windows I would be drilling through in a day. If the set of applications I was working with changed significantly, so that I noticed I needed a new set of fixed folder window locations for those hundred or so folders windows commonly used, is there a way to accomplish that without manually moving them all?
Make that changing window locations to once or twice a day, heck even thrice, and you'll see where I'm coming from.
Don't get me wrong, I like being able to control window locations - I used to use Ion. If you don't know, Ion is a window manager that lets you define boxes on the screen which contain windows in tabs, much like Mozilla would web pages. No other window manager gives you so much control of your real estate. I'd still be using Ion if it wasn't for the constant problems with applications (sometimes from version to version) deciding they couldn't handle working in that sort of enviroment without freaking out.
Speaking of spatial stuff, one thing I'd like to see GNOME have, well Metacity really, is edge resistance when moving windows around. It certainly reinforces the illusion that windows are objects moving stuff around the screen when , for example, gaim doesn't want to move over another window without a little gentle persuasion.
I'd like to see GNOME go places and do interesting things. I just don't want to see them fail to respect their existing userbase and those advanced users who might be attracted to their platform but not willing to change every work habit they have to use it while in the process proclaiming anyone who doesn't follow their One True Way as a fool.
In whose practice? By all means point me at current studies for real people showing that opening and closing a seperate window at a random-but-expected place on the screen is faster than opening one tree-based file
> First off, you've re-proven my point about having > to navigate two whole file trees, instead of one > and a part. This is inefficient.
No, you don't have to navigate two file trees. You start in the second browser in the file tree at exactly the same place that you were in the browser you invoked it from. Not that navigating two file trees is really a burden - they are always the same...
As for chasing windows, yes I can take a guess at where they are going to show up, but that does NOT mean that the last place I left a window is close to where I am invoking it from, or isn't going to be covered up by my on-top GAIM or Tvtime window. I may know that a window is going to show up on the left edge of my screen, but that doesn't mean I enjoy traversing 1600 pixels to get there. That is lost time and effort, distracting me from my current task, which is moving files from A to B, not "scan across my desktop to my new working locus."
> You do have a point about the file attributes,
> but with any sufficiently fast machine this
> should not be an issue, because the machine is
> usually just waiting on the human. Remember,
> this stuff worked just great circa 1984.
On machines with a great deal less to do in the background. I've frequently got compiles running, instant messengers, IRC, email, a few firefox instances with 30 tabs each, an OpenOffice invokation, and all the servers my system is running behind it all such as sshd.
Just because my machine has plenty of horsepower and resources doesn't mean I'm not using it at the moment for something other than seeing files in a directory I'm just passing through.
As for files being where I left them, since I use "text" style file manager views, and tree browsers my files are ALWAYS where I left them - in alphabetical order in the same directory they were last time, unless I moved them. It is simplicity itself to jump down via my scrollwheel to the spot in the list where the files I want live.
> I'm sorry, but practical experience disproves
> this. If you were correct, we'd have a lot of
> Windows users out there who understood how file > systems worked a lot better.
Most windows users are computer illiterate, yes. But some of those users do become computer literate, some even learn to become programmers and migrate to linux.
The point I was trying to make is that no matter how many amazing things your GUI does for the computer illiterate if it is going to reduce the number of people who become literate, it is a bad thing. Well, unless you're a support contracter who gets paid by the hour.
Windows has many problems - it is both difficult for the new user, as well as not discoverable beyond the most superficial level by the advanced user. It is getting better but its a long way away.
Anyhow, my big beef with GNOME 2.6 is the attitude that it is their way or the highway, that any other viewpoint is not even worth considering.
Before GNOME 2.6 I ran into alot of GNOME evangelism saying that Spatial Nautilis was amazing and productive, and the sacred GNOME HIG was going lead to the the ultimate UI. Use GNOME, it said, and all will be well. There will be no angst, and productivity will abound.
If statements like that are going to be made, then I have to hold those who speak up to the standard they profess to hold. Where is this ease of use? Where is this simple and fulfilling metaphor? Why is it that I, the advanced user, must get shorted in your drive to make things newbie friendly?
Often it is an advanced user who directly or indirectly chooses the initial computer experience of a newbie. As long as I feel the GNOME developers are hostile to myself and my needs I feel no need to introduce anyone to their work.
You have to know in advance that the GNOME developers differentiate between the file managing and "browsing" ones files. That distinction is non-obvious for the general public - only someone who is up to speed on this particular GUI development decision is going to be familiar with that meaning for the verb "browse".
I recently used GNOME 2.6 for a week to try out the Spatial Nautilus I had heard so much about (and oh were promises of milk and honey made!). It wasn't until the last two days of that trial before I found a post that clarified the GNOME-centric connotation of the word "browse".
Most of the world uses the terms file manager and file browser interchangably. The browse as a codeword for classic/Windows/OS X style file managing information is a bit non-obvious lingo.